Leaked! International Red Cross Report on CIA Torture

Mark Danner has scooped the NY Times, the Washington Post and other papers by publishing in the current New York Review of Books an essay quoting long excerpts of a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on "high-value" prisoners held in CIA black site prisons. The interviews took prior to their release in late 2006, and the report itself is dated February 2007, and likely was sent originally to then CIA Acting General Counsel, John Rizzo.

The prisoners interviewed by ICRC personnel included Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Walid Bin Attash, and twelve others, all of whom, the ICRC concluded, were submitted to torture. From the report's conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Mark Danner, who obviously has seen the entire 43 page report, calls the report "a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page." He reproduces a portion of its chilling Table of Contents. This is no bedtime reading:

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

As one follows the narratives of the various prisoners, Danner notes that one can see the construction of the CIA-Bush torture program unfold in all its brutalizing variety before one's eyes. Even, as caught Emptywheel's eye in her reading of Danner's article, prisoner Abu Zubaydah can notice that the torturers are experimenting on the type and effects of various torture methods upon him. From Zubaydah's narrative (emphasis added):

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds.... I don't know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted....

A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me.... I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before....

This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times....

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor....

I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.

Indeed, as Danner points out, there were changes to the interrogation-torture procedures. Since all the prisoners were kept isolated and out of contact with each other, the overall similarity of the treatment appears valid, and the differences and changes accurate. Danner reports:

Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the "long-time sitting" -— the weeks shackled to a chair—that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.

Nudity, on the other hand, is a constant in the ICRC report, as are permanent shackling, the "cold cell," and the unceasing loud music or noise. Sometimes there is twenty-four-hour light, sometimes constant darkness. Beatings, also, and smashing against the walls seem to be favored procedures; often, the interrogators wear gloves.

In later interrogations new techniques emerge, of which "long-time standing" and the use of cold water are notable....

A clear method emerges from these accounts, based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, and repeated beatings and "smashings"—though from this basic model one can see the method evolve, from forced sitting to forced standing, for example, and acquire new elements, like immersion in cold water.

Danner makes the connections which I and others have made between these techniques and the study of torture and "brainwashing" undertaken by the CIA and the military over 50 years ago, which culminated in the codification of such procedures in the CIA counterintelligence interrogation KUBARK manual of the early 1960s.

The NY Review article also confirms the ABC news report of approximately a year ago that reported how each variation and application of the torture techniques was vetted by the White House:

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers "briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee," including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who "then signed off on the [interrogation] plan." At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a "golden shield" from the Justice Department -— the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous "torture memorandum," written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002... Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees —- "whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning" -- in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed." At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

The Danner article, if one hasn't noticed yet, is must reading. He leaves nary a stone unturned: the complicity of some Congressional Democrats, the disaster which was the cover-up inspired Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the lies told by Bush and other administration officials to hide the truth of what was being done.

But, Danner also notes that, strangely, and for anyone who cared to read, there has been plenty of notice of what was happening in the "dark" crevices of U.S. foreign policy, even back to those dismal early months in 2002, when the torture gulag was fired up. "'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities" reads one headline from a Washington Post article from December 26, 2002.

Danner fails to make mention of the codification of many of these CIA procedures in the current version of the Army Field Manual (isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation), nor is there any discussion of the use of drugs on prisoners, which has surfaced in other prisoners' narratives of their incarceration. But what Danner does capture is the sense of psychic numbing that occurs as one reads over and over of how the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" was used on this prisoner and that prisoner, as one become inured to the brutality.

After a long discussion about the relative intelligence "value" of torture, Danner settles into a discussion about what we must do now. He certainly understands that there is a very important need to educate the public about what must be done. He is a little less certain that prosecutions should or can take place, but can see how hobbled the Obama administration is by this legacy, and how, despite Obama's wish to not look back and move forward, "he and his Department of Justice will be haunted by what his predecessor did."

Many officials of human rights organizations, who have fought long and valiantly to bring attention and law to bear on these issues, strongly reject any proposal that includes widespread grants of immunity. They urge investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration officials. The choices are complicated and painful. From what we know, officials acted with the legal sanction of the US government and under orders from the highest political authority, the elected president of the United States. Political decisions, made by elected officials, led to these crimes. But political opinion, within the government and increasingly, as time passed, without, to some extent allowed those crimes to persist. If there is a need for prosecution there is also a vital need for education. Only a credible investigation into what was done and what information was gained can begin to alter the political calculus around torture by replacing the public's attachment to the ticking bomb with an understanding of what torture is and what is gained, and lost, when the United States reverts to it.

I am one of those voices who speak loudly for prosecutions. But the more I read and understand, I see that the issue goes much farther than simply torture qua torture, or whether there should be a Truth Commission or prosecutions.

The corruption of government and the inability of the governmental ruling classes to interrupt or terminate the program of state-sanctioned torture, or stop the black propaganda fed, and well-plotted campaign to go to war in Iraq, or take command of an economic bubble and unregulated set of bogus financial schemes until they ballooned out of control and sought to bankrupt the entire country, this corruption and moral-political bankruptcy implicates immensely wide swaths of the government and ruling classes.

We are in a very tight spot, historically speaking. It is true that a significant section of civil society, located primarily among some human rights and civil liberties organizations, but with some links as well even into layers of the military (particularly military attorneys), are seeking some kind of change, some way in which a system of accountability can be secured. But they are laboring under the collective weight of a political system that cannot even look at itself in the mirror. Danner notes Obama and Holder's play to keep some of this information secure under "state secrets privilege" by the Executive Branch. The very leaking of the ICRC document shows what he thinks of that.

I don't have any simple answers. I know that we must only try and move towards the light. Our compass must be the dictates of justice and mercy, and also truth. We wish to build a better world. We know there are those who have... well, different ideas. We must be able to combat ignorance, and be smart ourselves. Learn from the past, prepare for the future. We must not flinch from what we need to do. We cannot go backwards. The world is already slipping backwards at an alarming rate. The ICRC report itself is documentary proof of that.

Let us move forward.

Update, roughly 11 pm, PDT:

The Washington Post has just put up their article covering the story. It has a nice tidbit for those who like to track down thing or speculate about who leaked the ICRC report, and why? (H/T http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2009/3/15/212138/793/254#c254ericlwis0)

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group's strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

The New York Times has posted a shortened version of the Mark Danner article on their Op-Ed page. (Double H/T to out of left field and to Stephen Soldz)

Speaking of Stephen Soldz, his remarks about the actions of military and CIA psychologists in the torture, made at a listserv for anti-torture psychologists, are worth repeating here (I've added the link within):

We must remember that the techniques detailed in these documents were designed by psychologists. These psychologists were present at the APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception. APA [American Psychological Association] has never explained why these torturers were invited or what they said or what was said to them. Nor have the APA leaders who invited and participated with these torturers expressed any remorse that they may have aided their torture. Rather, they tried to hide the attendance at this conference, even claimed to have "misplaced" it. And they have tried to change the subject to whether or not these torturers were "APA members", as if its fine to aid torturers if they aren't members.

Accountability for US torture MUST include accountability for those who aided the torturers, including those in the APA leadership who contributed. Continued silence is not acceptable. The truth must come out. We must pressure any Truth Commission or other accountability process to explore the role of the APA, other psychologists, and other health professionals, in the US torture program.

Well put, Stephen. And many thanks to all those for helping push the Daily Kos version of this blog posting, with its important anti-torture news and commentary to the top of the recommended list there. I won't be happy, though, until the issue is pushed to the top of the nation's agenda, and a history-making review and prosecution of these crimes begins.

Gitmo "Confession" Thrown Out, While CIA Wins Torture Secrecy Ruling

From the Miami Herald, 10/28/08:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- In a first, a military judge ruled on Tuesday that a Guantánamo detainee's confession was extracted through torture, and excluded it from the trial of a young Afghan detainee at the war court.

Afghan police threatened the family of teenager Mohammed Jawad while he was undergoing interrogation at a Kabul police station, said Army Col. Stephen Henley, the judge, in a three-page ruling.

Jawad, who was a teenager at the time of his capture in Afghanistan, has been fighting to have the charges against him dismissed. The recognition by the military court that death threats constitute torture, means his coerced confession cannot be used at his upcoming trial, due to start January 5, 2009.

According to attorney Jamil Dakwar, a military commissions observer for the American Civil Liberties Union, the judge's ruling rejects the "legal opinion by Bush administration lawyers that early on sought to soften the definition of torture by sanctioning threats to family members."

The Jawad case has highlighted the inherent unfairness of the military commissions process, established by Congress at the insistence of the Bush Administration. (For those interested, John McCain supported the Military Commissions bill, while Barack Obama opposed it.) Just a few weeks ago, the involvement of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) in the torture of Jawad at Gitmo was exposed. Last month, one of the Jawad's military prosecutors quit, charging the government with suppression of exculpatory evidence in Jawad's case.

USA Today's blog, On Deadline, has published a selection from Col. Henley's ruling (the entire ruling can be accessed here):

The Accused now moves this Military Commission to suppress all statements he made to Afghan government authorities on December 17, 2002 because they were obtained by the use of torture, as that term is defined in the Military Commission Rules of Evidence (MCRE).

A statement obtained by the use of torture shall not be admitted into evidence. “Torture” includes statements obtained by use of death threats to the speaker or his family; the actual infliction of physical or mental injury is not required. Instead, the relevant inquiry is whether the threat was specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon another person within the interrogator’s custody or control. In this case, the Afghan government and police authorities told the Accused he and his family would be killed if he did not confess to throwing the grenade. The interrogators were armed. There is no evidence the threats were made in jest or intended as a joke. Given the Accused’s age and the then reputation of the Afghan police as corrupt and violent, the Commission specifically finds these threats credible.

Evidence that someone died or suffered severe injury is not required for the Commission to determine that the threat to kill the Accused and his family was intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. On this point, the Commission can not envision a situation where a credible threat to kill someone unless they confess would not satisfy the “act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering” requirement in the MCRE definition of torture.

While the torture threshold is admittedly high, it is met in this case.

While Jawad's attorneys have been able to thread the needle in Jawad's case, and get the MC judge to rule that he was tortured, even by the MCRE's narrow definition of torture, the use of coerced confessions and reliance on evidence produced by torture remains a fixture of the MCRE process. It's an embarrassment and a crime that it was ever a question whether death threats by interrogators constituted torture of a detainee.

Meanwhile, CIA Wins Torture Secrecy Ruling

Consider another court ruling just released: according to Wired, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court ruled that "the CIA can hide statements from imprisoned suspected terrorists that the agency tortured them in its set of secret prisons." The ruling states that judicial review of allegations of torture from prisoners such as Khalid Sheihk Muhammad would jeopardize national security. (Link to Lamberth's ruling -- For all of you FISA fans: Judge Lamberth is remembered as FISA's secret spy court from 1995 to 2002.)

From the Wired article:

"The Court, giving deference to the agency’s detailed, good-faith declaration, is disinclined to second-guess the agency in its area of expertise through in camera review," Lamberth wrote (.pdf), referring to a procedure where a judge looks at evidence in his chamber without showing it to the opposing side....

"Among the details that cannot be publicly released are the conditions of the detainees’ capture, the employment of alternative interrogation methods, and other operational details," the CIA's Wendy Hilton told the court in a sworn affidavit (.pdf). "Specifically, disclosure of such information is reasonably likely to degrade the CIA's ability to effectively question terrorist detainees and elicit information necessary to protect the American people."

The CIA also successfully argued that it needed to redact statements about what countries were involved in the program, saying that such allegations could destroy relationships with countries that helped with the CIA's controversial program of secretly kidnapping suspected terrorists and shuttling them to hidden prisons in Europe and Asia, where neither families nor the Red Cross knew of their detention.

Transcripts from each of the 14 detainee's Combatant Status Review Tribunals in Guantanamo Bay were provided to the ACLU and posted to the Pentagon's website in the summer of 2007. Six of those included some redactions.

While one can be happy that Mohammad Jawad, imprisoned over five years now, may be able with the current ruling to more effectively fight the bogus charges against him, Lambeth's ruling shows just how far we have to go in the fight against torture in this country.

Operation Phoenix Reborn: New Yorker Expose on CIA "Black Sites"

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker has written a riveting piece on the recent history of the CIA recent torture program, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. The article helps us better piece together the history of CIA and military interrogation post 9/11, even if some of the information is fragmentary and contradictory.

One of the most startling revelations is that the CIA turned to its own history, resurrecting the techniques and model of its Operation Phoenix terror-torture program in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. While a program of "state-sanctioned torture and murder", where over 97% of the Vietnamese victimized were "of negligible importance", "C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model".

A Wikipedia article on "psychological warfare" notes:

The Phoenix Program had the dual aim of assassinating Viet Cong personnel and terrorizing any potential sympathizers or passive supporters. When members of the VCI were assassinated, CIA and Special Forces operatives placed playing cards in the mouth of the deceased as a calling card. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 Viet Cong supporters were killed.

Researcher Michael Otterman in his superlative examination of CIA/Pentagon torture over the years, American Torture, wrote of the Phoenix Program:

Phoenix was a CIA operation aimed at eliminating the Vietcong civilian infrastructure (VCI).... Unlike standard military operations, Phoenix targeted civilians, not soldiers. Phoenix was launched in 1965 -- the same year the USA announced it would abide by the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam....

There were two main components to the Phoenix Program: Provisional Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. The PrUs would kill VCI members, terrorise civilians and capture those deemed to have knowledge about VCI structures. At the interrogation centres, CIA interrogators, alongside their Vietnamese counterparts, would torture VCI prisoners in an effort to learn the identity of VCI members in each province....

PRUs were financed by the CIA, composed of Vietnamese fighters, and led on missions by members of the Navy SEALs. (pp. 60-62)

The CIA publishes on its own website the tale of one of Phoenix's prisoners, Nguyen Tai: The Man in the Snow White Cell.

As Tai must have anticipated, his confession did not end his ordeal. After giving him a short rest as a reward, his South Vietnamese interrogators came back with a request that he provide details about his personal background and history. Tai refused, and the torture resumed. He was kept sitting on a chair for weeks at a time with no rest; he was beaten; he was starved; he was given no water for days; and he was hung from the rafters for hours by his arms, almost ripping them from their sockets. After more than six months of interrogation and torture, Tai felt his physical and psychological strength ebbing away; he knew his resistance was beginning to crack. During a short respite between torture sessions, to avoid giving away the secrets he held in his head during the physical and psycho-logical breakdown he could feel coming, Tai tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists.

Hung by his arms from the rafters? Bashing his head against the wall? This is exactly what we read in Jane Mayer's article Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Queda "mastermind" kept in isolation and tortured by the CIA endured, along with other "high-profile" detainees, endured.

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground....

Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. “Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.”

The Mayer piece also describes a confidential International Red Cross report on the secret detentions that according to sources makes it clear that torture took place:

One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

You can see in Mayer's New Yorker article the tension between two competing narratives. On one hand, like the recent Katherine Eban piece in Vanity Fair, some of Mayer's seek to make SERE psychologists responsible for the CIA's fall into torture, believing the CIA not to have any experienced torturers, oops, I mean interrogators on hand in October 2001. Elsewhere in the New Yorker article, someone tries to tell her the CIA has no experience in running prisons, something which the Phoenix history itself contradicts. On the other hand, Mayer alludes to the previous history of the Agency (the Phoenix material, the decades of sensory deprivation research, the quick transformation of the CIA program into strict professionalism, etc.), which is steeped in torture experience.

As the Red Cross report points to some serious legal and political repercussions -- someone seems to feel that congressional scandal and prosecutions are inevitable -- a scramble is taking place to selectively leak and to mold the narrative of what happened and who's responsible.

The history of American torture is a veritable lost continent of criminal activity with links to the highest levels of the U.S. government and civilian establishment. The time has come to expose the entire substance of this awful truth, and bring those responsible for crimes against humanity, ostensibly done in our names, to justice -- fair, swift, humane, and inevitable.

Recent Report Lists U.S. "Disappeared" Prisoners, Including Children

The barbarity of the U.S. government is profound. A report issued last month by Human Rights Watch, U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the “War on Terror”, includes a new list of those the U.S. government has "disappeared", i.e., kidnapped, and taken to secret U.S. detention centers. The list, compiled by a number of human rights group, such as Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School, includes nationals from countries including Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan and Spain. These desaparecidos were seized in countries as far apart as Morocco, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya, and Spain.

The report also includes a section on women and children, the families of the kidnapped or disappeared prisoners, who have also been taken into secret imprisonment. The best known case of wives and children seized involves the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. His two young sons, aged seven and nine, were also arrested with Mohammed in September 2002. According to eyewitness reports

...the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while US agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts....

The human rights groups are calling on the US government to put a permanent end to the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, and to disclose the identities, fate, and whereabouts of all detainees currently or previously held at secret facilities operated or overseen by the US government as part of the “war on terror.”

The "forced disappearance" of a person is a "crime against humanity", subject to no statute of limitation, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Of course, the United States, along with Libya, Qatar, China, and Iraq, have refused to ratify the Rome Statute. Other reluctant signators, Israel and Yemen, signed in late 2000.

The arrest and forced detention of children at secret locations must qualify as a war crime or crime against humanity if anything ever did. And -- for those who have followed my coverage of psychologist involvement in U.S. torture and war crimes -- of course, there had to be psychologists involved in this crime as well. True, they are supposedly involved in order to do good, as the handmaidens of war criminals.

According to the UK Telegraph account of the seizure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family:

The boys [ages 7 and 9] have been held by the Pakistani authorities but this weekend they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their father.

Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." [Emphasis mine]

I would like to have one of the great ethicists that seem to mushroom over at the American Psychological Association -- perhaps Stephen Behnke, or Melba Vasquez -- explain how ethical it is to be a psychologist at a secret prison, serving the kidnapped children of other kidnapped prisoners, who have no rights, and whose parents are being tortured. Is this what the tortured logic of the APA leadership has come to?

The UK Guardian reported the story when it broke early last month, including this bit on Mohammad's children:

The report also expresses concern over the fate of Yusuf al-Khalid and Abed al-Khalid, the sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were taken into custody, aged nine and seven, in September 2002, during an attempt to capture their father. A former detainee says that he saw them in March the following year, around the time their father was captured, in a secret prison where the guards tormented them with insects.

While Sheik Mohammad's situation got the most publicity, there were other families -- women and children -- who were also kidnapped and held incommunicado. HRW reported on some of these:

On March 28, 2003, Aafia Siddiqui (see page 21) was reportedly apprehended in Karachi, Pakistan along with her three children (then aged seven years, five years and six months)....

On July 24, 2004, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a detainee who the U.S. government has acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held at Guantánamo Bay, was reportedly apprehended in Gujarat, Pakistan, along with two women (his wife, an Uzbek national and the Pakistani wife of South African national Zubair Ismail) and five children. His apprehension was reportedly a joint Pakistani-U.S. operation, coordinated with CIA and FBI officials.

I almost don't know how to end an article such as this one. If I could, like the last episode of The Sopranos, I'd fade to black for a long time and let this one sink in.

Here's a link to the entire HRW/Center for Constitutional Rights/Amnesty International/Cageprisoners/et al. report (PDF). And here's an Action Link regarding the lawsuit against the government on the secret dentention centers, put up by Center for Constutional Rights.

Where is Jose Padilla on the Night of the Democratic Debate? (Silent enim leges inter arma )

"The law is silent in wartime."

Lewis Z. Koch is doing a fabulous job over at firedoglake with his series coverage of the Padilla trial (and I borrowed the Latin quote from him, via Cicero). Koch reports on the inanity of the government's case, and on the ban on evidence that is keeping much of the truth of Padilla's treatment and torture interrogations from the jury. Now Judge Marcia Cooke has ruled FBI wiretaps will be included as evidence,

rejecting arguments by defense attorneys that phone conversations that mentioned Osama bin Laden were irrelevant and threatened to prejudice the jury.

The government picks and chooses its evidence, doing its best to fob off this phony show trial as the work of an intrepid government on the trail of wrong-doers.

Arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare Airport in Chicago for supposedly plotting to set off a "dirty bomb" for Al Qaeda, small-time ex-hood Jose Padilla, who converted to Islam in jail, is on trial with two others, co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, for vague conspiracy charges of helping Islamic terrorism. Held incommunicado for years at the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and tortured psychologically with intense isolation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, forced stress positions, and, according to Mr. Padilla's attorneys, psychoactive drugs, Padilla was transferred from "enemy combatant" status to federal indictee after the Supreme Court delivered their decision in the Hamdan case.

The torture Padilla endured was of the Kubark variety, a CIA interrogation formula that relies on psychological and neuroscientific research done forty to fifty years ago. Sometimes you will hear the press say that the U.S. is applying ex-Soviet or Korean or Chinese torture techniques, but the reality is that, while based on study of those techniques, the U.S., through the CIA, the School of the Americas, and the military's SERE programs, fine-tuned their own style of torture, and then exported it around the world.

I recommend that readers check out Koch's well-written essays on the Padilla trial. I'll try and look at a wide range of coverage and report it back here.

Democrats Speak Out Loudly for Habeas, Against Torture, for Human Rights... Not!

Meanwhile, why link the Padilla case to the Democratic debate? Because, with only a few very brief exceptions, nothing was said about the debasement of both democracy and basic decency by this country's descent into being a militarist, torturing country. (Kucinich may have been a partial exception, and Chris Dodd got in a shot against the Bush war on civil liberties at the very end, with Wolf Blitzer trying to cut him off. I'm sure others will feel I'm unfair to their candidate, and I hope you put their documented positions on militarism and torture in the comments of this piece, for all our sakes.)

Sure, I've both researched and reported that U.S. torture goes back decades. But the difference now is that it's openly debated, voted on, and supported still by the Congress and many public media voices. Bush has made torture into a talking point! and turned the direction of political discourse in this country towards the pre-Enlightenment era, i.e., backwards some two or three hundred years.

And this after the bloody tirades by GOP candidates at their FOX debate, clamoring one over the other (not to mention John McCain's political corpse) to make themselves more to the right than Bush and Gonzales on "rough" interrogations. And no Democrat will say nary a word about a U.S. citizen held without right to a hearing, in isolation, tortured for years, and now placed on a show trial where gag orders keep the jury from even hearing much of the evidence -- because the evidence was educed via torture of both the defendant, and also of the supposed witnesses to the "dirty bomb" plot (like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who no one can believe because of the non-stop torture of the man). Hence, the "dirty bomb" plot, the linchpin of John Ashcroft's pathetic career, was dropped, and is forgotten except by Koch and a handful of bloggers.

The Padilla trial should be getting top coverage across the blogosphere, but aside from Koch's articles at firedoglake, and the work of others, like Jeralyn at TalkLeft, and David Markus at the Southern District of Florida Blog, the case gets precious little coverage.

We should demand the release of Padilla and his co-defendants, victims of Bush's demagogic "war on terror" and pawns in his ambition to turn the United States into a torture nation. We can not afford to be silent. Not in a time of war. Not ever.